1. Field
The following description relates to technology for a computer aided diagnosis (CAD) of an ultrasound image and to technology for sampling an ultrasound image.
2. Description of Related Art
Computer aided diagnosis (CAD) of an ultrasound image represents technology to enable users, such as doctors, to diagnose a disease of a patient by extracting a region of interest in an ultrasound image and analyzing features of lesions. The CAD processing is provided to detect a lesion included in a capture image, and to this end, the entire region of an image may be subject to various image processing techniques, for example, feature pyramid generation and sliding window matching. There is a tradeoff between the time for image processing and the detection accuracy of lesions detected by image processing.
In the conventional real time CAD technology this tradeoff is balanced such that CAD processing is performed only on selected images rather than all of the captured images. Images subjected to the CAD processing are selected by sampling at equal time intervals such that the images equally include captured human body regions. However, when a probe for ultrasound image capturing changes a photography angle, a movement distance according to rotation of each region in a captured image may vary depending on the depth from the surface of a human body. If CAD processing is performed only on some images that are sampled at equal time intervals among all images photographed at different photography angles, a lesion located remotely from the surface of a human body is less likely to be sampled when compared to a lesion located adjacent to the surface, which in turn, means it is less likely to be detected by CAD.